


The Maple Leaf Forever

by ellen_fremedon



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Canadian Shack, F/M, Gen, Global Warming, mounties, strangely familiar OCs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 04:25:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/pseuds/ellen_fremedon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can get Mark Vorkosigan into a Canadian Shack, but you can't keep him there long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Maple Leaf Forever

**Author's Note:**

> I know _Acer saccharum_ doesn't range nearly that far north, yet, but they've had a thousand years of global warming.
> 
> Thank you to Sanj for beta!

The cabin had been stocked with wood, fuel cylinders, and an easily-sabotaged power cell for the grav-plates; the whole thing went up in a highly conspicuous pillar of black smoke. At first, warming himself at the blaze, he was almost cheerful, as long as he stayed upwind of the reek of burning meat-- he hadn't had the strength to drag out any of the Jacksonians except the one who was still alive.

The smell of charred flesh wasn't entirely distasteful. It kept Killer enjoying his gloat over the fight, and Gorge and Howl tangled up in a knot of hunger and shame that his therapist was going to have a field day with, but at least they were out of his way, and he could meet his rescue with-- well, as much dignity as possible when dressed in the last Jacksonian's coverall, split at the seams from waist to knee.

If rescue ever came. The sun was foundering, after a shockingly brief day, the fire nearly dead, and the wind rising fast; the day's cold had clearly been a practice run for night.

When questioning his prisoner hadn't revealed any comms equipment, he'd gambled everything on the fire being seen. His therapist would be proud of that-- that he'd trusted, at some deep level, that someone would look out for him. Pity he might never get to tell her. He tightened the drawstring of his cavernous hood-- and, as an afterthought, tucked a fold of the unconscious thug's blanket around his ears.

Maybe he should have dragged some of the woodpile away from the house. Could he burn what was left of the cabin? Charcoal was just burnt wood, wasn't it?

A poke through the remnants of the cabin turned up glowing embers, but nothing they would set alight. He huddled by the warmest patch and wondered how long it took to die of exposure.

And whether it usually involved hallucinations, because there came a craft, rapidly approaching out of the snow: a lift-van, big, its nose emblazoned with-- ah. Definitely a hallucination-- wherever this place was, it was halfway across the nexus from Barrayar; his rescuers were not going to display the Vorkosigan maple leaf.

Pity. His therapist might have been happy to hear about that delusion. His mother definitely would. But the lift-van was going to fade out of existence any minute now. It was certainly not thumping to a hasty landing and kicking up a cloud of snow and ash, and not opening to disgorge--

"Mark!"

\--to disgorge Kareen, in a fur hat and a big knitted scarf, sprinting though the cinders and scooping him into a very real hug. "Mark, you clever thing, I knew you'd find a way to get a message out." She scrutinized him in the light of the lift-van's headlamps. "Do you need a medic?"

"Probably not as badly as he does," Mark admitted, waving vaguely at his prisoner. "What I need is a coat that fits."

"Allow me." A man in livery-- several men in livery-- had emerged from the lift-van. They were dressed colorfully enough for Barrayar, not in Vorkosigan brown-and-silver or Bharaputran brown-and-pink but in a cheery and utterly unfamiliar red. One held out a thick and pillowy parka exactly Mark's size. "Ms. Koudelka took the precaution of securing appropriate clothing."

"Thank you." Mark sank into the coat's embrace, feeling instantly more human. "Where exactly am I?"

"Thirty-five kilometers west-northwest of Fort Good Hope, near the shores of--" Mark frowned. "Canada, sir."

He looked at Kareen. "Earth," she translated. "And this is Constable Macrimmon of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Was it the Jacksonians?" She craned her neck to watch Mark's unconscious captor being loaded onto a stretcher by two more liveried armsmen, but his face didn't reveal much beyond incipient frostbite.

"I'm guessing Bharaputra-- or men in his employ, not from the house itself. They almost had me convinced this _was_ Jackson's Whole."

Kareen took his arm; the wonderful coat muffled the feeling, but Mark wasn't willing to give it up yet. "With nowhere to run to short of high orbit. Oh, Mark." One of the medics left the Jacksonian to the other's care and tried to shine a light into Mark's eyes; Kareen waved her off. "What gave them away?"

He tried to answer without smiling-- and failed, from the look on the medic's face. "One of them flipped a coin to decide which hand to start with."

Macrimmon beamed, incongruously. "And thus revealed the grav-plates in the ceiling." The medic glared. "Well, they must have been in the ceiling, Rae. It was the purchase of the grav-plates that put us onto the galactics' trail," he explained, "though, I confess, I had assumed they were meant to _augment_ the local gravity, not counteract it."

"Yeah." The persistent medic reached out with a scanner; Kareen looked assessingly at Mark, and allowed it. "You had us looking for a couple of Polians."

"Fortunately," Macrimmon said, "Mr. Vorkosigan had the presence of mind to interpret the oddities in the coin's motion as the result of gravitic interference. Did its direction of spin reverse at the top of its arc?"

"It may have. But mostly, it let me know I was dealing with people who'd learned intimidation from the holos." He let the smile out, and this time even Macrimmon backed away. "Amateurs."

Someone signaled that the prisoner was secured, and the armsmen piled back into the vehicle. The maple leaf emblem, Mark saw, was the same red as their livery. "Royal Canadian Mounted Police, huh? What exactly are you mounted on?"

Macrimmon gave him a hand up into the van; Mark was too exhausted to refuse. "Horses, traditionally, but the name is mostly a relic now. As is the 'Royal.' We are, however, still very much Canadian."

"So you said." Mark sank back against Kareen's shoulder. She wrapped her arm around him, uncaring of their audience, lovely Kareen. "So what do people do in Canada?"

Kareen keyed up her notebook. "I thought maple mead. There's some lovely woods here." She shrugged apologetically. "We bought most of the land between here and the Fort. It was faster than getting the warrants."

"Oh, good." He was almost warm. It was lovely to be warm, warm and safe and not dead yet. "Carry on then."


End file.
